Why so many intellectuals against the reform?
Anyone who has to deal with sophisticated, upright and "independent" intellectuals by profession sometimes wonders why many of them are against the reform. To answer, they can be classified into four categories: those of the detail, those of counter power, those of anti-populism, those of there is much more.
Culture, professionalism, mental rigor are friends of detail. Wrong details need to be found and corrected. Behind the position of the intellectuals of the detail there is the right insistence that even the propaganda for the "yes" has put in inviting to read the reform carefully and not to vote guided by political reasons unrelated to the judgment on its validity. The insistence is right but must be accompanied by the recommendation to weigh the pros and cons of the details that are discovered in the reading and vote by weighing their different importance.
Here is the "why not" given to La Stampa by a young student, who perhaps wants to imitate some professor of detail: the reform grants the title of senator and immunity to representatives of discredited local bodies. Given, and not granted, that this is true, how come the argument is not compensated with the new, important limits that the reform puts on the power of local authorities, also reducing the occasions for sin and the incentives to sin? Then those involved in detail become suspects of bad faith when they make believe, against all evidence and all political and juridical common sense, that a reform with better details can be done soon after rejecting it.
Those of the counterpower: the best intellectuals often rightly feel themselves to be professionals in the control of power. They are horrified by the "betrayal of clerics". So, even though they know well the differences between Weimar, the post-war period and today, they are inclined to sympathize with a Constitution which, in the memory of fascism, has allowed the multiplication of veto rights of a thousand counter-powers, in the fear that power will become excessive power . The reform proposed in the referendum only slightly reduces the excess of vetoes that blocks the country's reforms and tries to give the counter-powers a more appropriate place, such as a Senate of autonomies, and to better make them responsible, as when it brings the criteria to the constitutional level to silence the opposition by placing trust.
But the alarm of the priests of the counter-powers does not subside: "the government would come out too strong". In their case, too, there is an aspect of intellectual good faith; at times, unfortunately there is also the suspicion of contiguity and connivance with those who earn unjust rents from managing some counter-power: privileged bureaucracies (including academic ones), undergrowths of local authorities, stubborn sectarianism of the residual party politics, areas of the judiciary, fringes of media corporations trade union and business. From the point of view of the economy, those in the counterpower are the least convinced that the recipe for restarting growth is above all structural reforms: because these require precisely the fight against the particular interests that organize themselves into counterpowers to block them. Those of the counterpowers prefer to blame austerity and Mrs. Merkel.
Those of anti-populism. This group is in the most paradoxical situation, to the point that every now and then it suffers from dizziness, it is disoriented and its argument suffers from strange out of tune. The intellectual is by definition anti-populist. The reform was carried out with effort, compromises and captatio benevolentiae by the government, first in the very long parliamentary battle and then in the tough referendum campaign. In doing so, in addition to the strong personalization carried out by Renzi for a long time, the propaganda resorted to all possible tones of rhetoric, from the most lucid to the most cheesy ones. There are grounds for an accusation of populism and professional anti-populists are seizing the opportunity.
There is, however, the problem, the paradox: the most blatant populists in the Italian political arena, whose names it is superfluous to name, are violently against the government and the reform and the anti-populist intellectuals find them alongside, often with similar criticisms of the text submitted to a referendum. They are found side by side and sometimes they almost adopt their tones. Confusing. So, all together, is it a courtyard of more or less opposing populist cries?
Or are we all riding an ill-defined concept, populism, which risks obscuring reflection on the ways in which it is right and necessary to seek consensus to govern a complex and difficult-to-evolve democracy? Perhaps the more than justified hunt for the terrible witch of the exchange vote is making us lose the right measures in judging those who must weigh and dose the compromises with extreme care but cannot avoid them all completely?
Finally, there are those of the there is much more. Benaltrismo is also one of the ways in which a certain intellectual pride is declined. And here are the profound connoisseurs of the history of the Republic who minimize the importance of having the right Constitution: what matters is something else. What? The choice is wide, ranging from political cohesion to the credibility of leaders, from the result of clashes between interest groups at the base of the country to uncontrollable events of the international situation, from the rate of ethics that animates citizens and their representatives up to supreme refinements, as the effective functioning of the material constitution which depends only in part on the formal one.
With regard to the material constitution, someone observes that important laws have also been implemented with the current bicameralism: true, as it is true that this has often required forcing the material constitution by humiliating and removing responsibility from the parliamentary debate with the systematic blackmail of the vote of confidence. Alongside the "high" benaltrism, there is also that of a less noble league, short-sighted, that of: why waste time with the constitution when there is a need to stimulate growth.
This is less nobly intellectual but can be dangerously techno-economic to the point of resorting to econometric acrobatics to simulate the impact of one thing or the other. The perplexity that the benaltrist objection arouses is twofold: on the one hand, one does not see why giving up improving constitutional rules due to the fact that they are not the only ones to determine our destiny; on the other hand, the obstacles that equal bicameralism and the current formulation of Title V place in the way of carrying forward, sooner and better, all the "other", that is, the other reforms, the economic and social ones that everyone feels are very urgent, are evident.
